J. Michael Lennon

Norman Mailer's authorized biographer, archivist, and close friend; Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and Chair of the Editorial Board of The Mailer Review. With Donna Pedro Lennon he compiled the print Norman Mailer: Works and Days (2000; revised 2018) on which this digital project is founded, and he is named here as a founding editor.

J. Michael Lennon is Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University and Chair of the Editorial Board of The Mailer Review. He is the author or editor of several books about Mailer, including the authorized biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013), Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014), and On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007, co-authored with Mailer). He co-founded the Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University in 2005, and his work has appeared in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, New York, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Times Literary Supplement, Provincetown Arts, Hippocampus, and The Mailer Review.

As Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer, Lennon spent decades inside the writer’s life and papers — a relationship he made the subject of his own 2022 collection Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, where Mailer figures as his “literary pater familias” beside Lennon’s own father. He also co-edited the posthumous Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal: 1954–1955 (2024) with Gerald R. Lucas and Susan Mailer, and his essays on Mailer include “The Naked and the Read: Inside the Library of Norman Mailer” (Times Literary Supplement, 2018), a tour of Mailer’s working library.

Mailer and Lennon first met in late October 1972, when Lennon — then teaching in Illinois — covered Mailer’s appearance at Western Illinois University for Sunrise (“Norman Mailer in Illinois,” 72.19), where Mailer screened Beyond the Law and read from the still-unreleased St. George and the Godfather. It was the beginning of a thirty-five-year association.

Role in this project

With his wife Donna Pedro Lennon, Lennon compiled the print Norman Mailer: Works and Days — original edition (2000) and revised edition (2018, which Jerry Lucas helped revise and edit) — building on the earlier compilations of Robert F. Lucid, Laura Adams, and Thomas Fiske. That print volume is the primary seed of this digital edition’s register; its numbered entries and prose are credited permanently in the original-author field of derived pages. In the editorial succession that began in 2026, J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon are named throughout as founding editors, with Jerry Lucas as continuing editor (see About this project).

Related pages

• Mailer's Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature | Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal | Robert F. Lucid | About this project
• Norman Mailer in Illinois (72.19)

Cite as: /people/j-michael-lennon
Last updated: 2026-06-06